Untitled Self: Kumi Yamashita

Profile, 1994
wood, light, cast shadow
Description: The number and the alphabet blocks,
lit from the left, cast a silhouette of a man's profile.
Image from: http://kumiyamashita.com/

Kumi Yamashita was born in Japan and got her BFA in the Cornish College of the Arts in Washington State. She later went on tho do an MFA in the Glasgow School of Art in the UK.

City View ,2003 Light, Aluminum, Shadow Permanent display at the 2nd floor of Nanba Parks Tower, Osaka, Japan. Commissioned by Nankai Railways Inc. Description: The numbers scattered on the wall, lit from the right, cast a silhouette of a woman. "I like looking at the light in the afternoon and watching shadows move.
It reminds me that everything is always changing. I like things that do not have
concrete form, like clouds, water, shadows, and the kindness of people.
Image from: http://kumiyamashita.com/

"I have been experimenting with light and shadows along with
various other media to examine what separates solid and ephemeral, visible and
invisible, inner and outer.

One of the issues I focus on is the boundary
we create within ourselves by categorizing the world. Through my work I wish to
remind ourselves of how we preconceive what is around and inside us. Knowledge,
ideas, and values are too often accepted without questioning. Can we find a way
to evaporate ourselves from a pond and condensate over an ocean? Can we see a
common thread that connects all things?"

Clouds,2005
Light, Aluminum, Shadow
Permanent display at the 3rd floor of Stellar Place Sapporo JR Tower
Commissioned by Japan Railways Inc.
Description: The thin metal object on the wall,
lit from above, casts the silhouette of a couple.
Image from: http://kumiyamashita.com/

Kumi Yamashita traces figures with the most obscure materials. Her subjects include shadows on the wall or dirty prints from a pair of old boots. Her graphic skills are amazingly well honed and the delightful images she produces are even more pleasing because we doubt our eyes when we see how they are produced. In one installation lifelike forms of the human body in motion are produced by the most unlikely source. On the wall, illuminated by a single strong lamp, we can see an arrangement of ordinary children's building blocks. Some are shaped like block letters or toy animals, but they are random forms in different sizes and shapes. Yamashita has arranged these so that each throws a particular shadow which, when taken with all the other precisely placed objects, astonishingly adds up to the illusion of reality.

"Landscape", detail, 33" x 34" x 26", 2001 Light, cast shadow, fiberglass, steel, wood, motor. (Kinetic, shadow mouth appears to move as if talking.)
Image from: http://www.rair.org/MarshellGalleryl-Kumi.htm

In her piece called "Landscape" she has used the most mundane medium, a dish, to portray a shadow of a talking person. The dish rotates as a steel bar stays in place, and with the shadow it casts into the "landscape" and the shadow appears to speak. I still don't know if sound forms part of the experience, but somehow I believe it is not, it would deter from the surreal feeling and awe from the ability to create such illusive alternative.